Thanks for the tip, golinux. I was able to read the post.

Fungus, your post is clearly political and tangential. I don't see what neoliberalism, veganism, and political correctness have to do with this thread. If this forum's rules prohibit political/tangential posts, then the post is inappropriate and golinux is just doing his job. Nevertheless, I agree with you that the rules need to apply to all forum/list users and that certain users should not be singled out.

BTW, I hope you realize that you are convicting yourself of selfishness and saying that you don't deserve to use Devuan when you write: "individuals who do use open/free software, do they deserve it?  In my perception no, because they are doing it just for their own selfish interests." You do realize that Debian and Devuan's core is all free software? The main repository consists of nothing but free software It all goes back to Debian's founding: "The Debian Project is an association of individuals who have made common cause to create a free operating system."

As for "self restricting", we all do it: We don't associate with certain people or use certain things in the interest of avoiding harm or potential for harm. The potential for harm in using proprietary software is well documented and I'm not going to rehash that here. If your point is that free software in userspace is of little use when things are proprietary closer to metal (BIOS and firmware), then I completely agree and that's why I'm not going to waste time and effort to hop from compromised phone to compromised phone.

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Anyway, back to the main topic of the thread: I hope the Librem 5 proves to be the holy grail phone that's fully functional and uses only free software from the bootloader on up, but I guess we'll have to wait and see.

If Purism makes compromises when they hit road blocks, theirs will be just another "security and privacy focused" "mostly free" phone. I think such devices are doomed from the start because most potential users (folks who care about privacy) already have a "mostly free" device that they've configured to be "security and privacy focused".

Thanks, fungus. I'll look into udoo, but my guess is that it isn't 100% libre given that I couldn't find it anywhere on FSF's lists.

The only fully free phone OS I am aware of is Replicant. I've tried Replicant 6 on a few phones but I couldn't get any of them to recognize my SIM card, making the phones useless.

I'm going to hold on to my current "compromised" phone until I have something that runs only free software and, unlike Replicant, actually works for me.

I wrote to Purism. My question:

Their answer:

Yes, I think this is what I'll end up doing. I work at the computer all day and last thing I want when I'm reading "for fun" is more screen time.

I figured. The book doesn't have to be super recent. I'd be happy with something 5 years old or less.

Only free software from main repository on both Debian and Devuan, so that's not it.

I discovered (via lshw) that the driver is xhci_hcd. lsmod shows that the respective kernel module is loaded on both Debian and Devuan.

@fungus: Not to get political, but your signature invites it Respecting other people's right to free speech does not constitute endorsement of their worldview.

You're welcome, Armin. Ha ha--we're both refugees from Gnome3/systemd

Thanks for inspiring me to do things the right way, and for the link to the Enigmail FAQs. That was huge.

Given how similar our setups are, it's a safe bet that the steps in #5 above will work for you. Please let me know how it goes.

I completely agree. It was pure laziness that was holding me back.

At any rate, since my laziness was called out I went ahead and upgraded thunderbird and installed enigmail (version 1.9.8) from Devuan repository using package manager--then took a deep breath to deal with the fallout.

From reading Enigmail's FAQ, it seems the Enigmail developers are most familiar with gpg-agent/pinentry and not gnome-keyring and the like. I'm on MATE with gnome-keyring and decided to see if my problems would go away if configured Enigmail to use gpg-agent/pinentry instead of gnome-keyring.

Here is how I configured Enigmail to use gpg-agent and pinentry instead of gnome-keyring:

1. Add "use-agent" (without quotes) to ~/.gnupg/gpg.conf

2. Add "use-standard-socket" (without quotes) to ~/.gnupg/gpg-agent.conf (if the file does not already exist, create it)

3. Reboot

Launch Thunderbird and try using Enigmail. If the window that pops up asking for your password is not called "pinentry", then gnome-keyring is forcing itself on Enigmail and you need a few more steps (I needed steps 4-6 as well, so don't feel bad):

4. Create /usr/bin/thunderbird-wrapper with your favorite text editor, put this in it:

#!/bin/bash
unset GPG_AGENT_INFO
exec /usr/bin/thunderbird "$@"

5. In a terminal, make the wrapper script executable:

sudo chmod a+x /usr/bin/thunderbird-wrapper

6. Make sure that the Thunderbird icons in your menu +/- panel point to /usr/bin/thunderbird-wrapper and not /usr/bin/thunderbird

Reboot, launch Thunderbird, and try using Enigmail again. The window asking for your password when you use Enigmail should now be called "pinentry" and everything should work (encryption, signing, decryption, remembering pin for desired time period).